East Africa Drought

The Media and Disasters

What is the Link Between Economic Development and Humanitarian Response?

The Ongoing Response to the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan

New Zealand’s Relief Operation in Response to the Earthquake

Responding to the Haiti Earthquake Disaster: One Year On

Greening the Humanitarian Reponse: 2010 Haiti Earthquake

Forgotten Pakistan

We'd Better Change our Act!

From Experience to Working on a Better Future

Jurgita Balaisyte and Luk N. Van Wassenhove - July 2011

East Africa is experiencing the worst droughts for the past 60 years. Seasonal rains failed to arrive in October – December 2010 so this spring livestock was lost. As a result over 10 million people are facing severe food shortages or are malnourished.

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte, Maria Besiou and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 6 June 2011-

2010 witnessed 385 natural disasters that killed more than 297,000 people worldwide and affected over 217 million others. Some disasters received more media attention than others. Although more than five times more people were affected by China’s floods than by the earthquake in Haiti and the floods in Pakistan combined, China’s floods received far less media attention than either Pakistan or Haiti. In this commentary we discuss the media’s impact on the donations for the affected populations. Read the rest of this article...

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 10 May 2011-

What is the Link Between Economic Development and Humanitarian Response?

May 11th marked the second month of the relief effort in response to the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan. As of May 5th, the number of deaths was 14,817, the number of injured was 5,279, and the number of missing is 10,171 (according to the National Police Agency). The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster showed that even a prosperous and a well prepared country like Japan can be challenged by complex disasters. When disaster occurs in a highly populated area casualties are almost unavoidable. However, preparedness can minimise casualties and losses. Prepared countries with governments that exercise strong leadership and internal resources usually are more coherent in disaster response.

Disaster life cycle includes four stages: mitigation, preparedness, response and rehabilitation. Mitigation addresses the proactive social component of emergencies. This includes laws and mechanisms that reduce the vulnerability of the population and increase resilience. Mitigation leads to better preparedness, putting in place the response mechanisms to counter factors that society has not been able to mitigate (Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, 2009). In addition, governance and socio-economic conditions often have a great impact on the disaster preparedness and response. Read the rest of this article...

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte, Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, Orla Stapleton,

Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 14 March 2011-

The earthquake, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, which took place in Japan on Friday 11th March was the world’s fifth largest earthquake since 1900 and was 700 times more powerful than the one that struck Haiti last year. However, despite the devastation playing out on our television screens, the damage and losses are relatively low when we consider the magnitude of the disaster. In Tokyo for example, the damage from the earthquake was very limited and the reaction of the people on the streets illustrated the level of preparedness of the country for this type of disaster.

However, the situation has become much more complex since the initial disaster. The earthquake unleashed a monstrous tsunami, up to 10 metres in some areas, that surged water in some areas 10 kilometres inland, causing extensive damage and resulting in numerous casualties. In addition, there is a high risk of meltdown in one of the countries nuclear power plants and an oil refinery has been set alight. What began as a sudden onset natural disaster has degenerated into a massive humanitarian crisis. Although initially foreign assistance was not deemed necessary, due to the complexity of situation, the Prime Minister of Japan has called for international assistance to deal with emergency response activities while continuing the massive search and rescue operation. Read the rest of this article...

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 1 March 2011-

On February 21st at 23h51 local time an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 on the Richter scale struck the South Island of New Zealand. The epicentre of the earthquake was located 10 km south east of a highly populated area in the Canterbury Province, the city of Christchurch (population 380,000). Therefore, although it occurred at 5 km depth, what is considered a relatively ‘moderate’ seismic activity, had a devastating impact. This was the second major seismic activity in five months in the area.

In the aftermath of this devastating earthquake, we are looking at the coordination and relief efforts in order to use the learning in the future. The Christchurch earthquake response can be used as an example of a well coordinated and managed relief operation. The success of the operation can be mainly attributed to a combination of issues, such as strong leadership and governance at the local level, focused and immediate action, strong support at many institutional levels, population unity, availability of various experts and specialists, no major crimes and international support. Read the rest of this article...

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte, Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, Orla Stapleton,

Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 13 Janvier 2011-

Wednesday 12th January 2011 marked the first anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. One year on, the international humanitarian effort is moving from the response into the rehabilitation phase. Rehabilitation includes recovery activities. Regardless of the unprecedented international response in terms of funding pledges from public donations, donor governments and multilateral institutions, the long-term recovery from the disaster has barely begun. There is speculation as to the causes of this delay. The lack of progress is blamed on a combination of issues, such as indecision regarding the Haitian government, donor countries' pursuit of their own aid priorities, and the lack of capacity of Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. In addition operational challenges such as the delayed conversion of donor pledges to concrete funding, the huge quantity of debris still present on the streets in Port-au-Prince and the complicated land tenure system of the country, are continuing to hamper the rehabilitation process. Read the rest of this article...

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The report on "Greening the Humanitarian Reponse: 2010 Haiti Earthquake", is an exploratory study, which relied on practitioner interviews.

Special thanks to those who reviewed drafts of the report including Tom Delrue (UNEP/PCDMB), Frederic Urlep, Samuel Petragallo, Michel Tomaszek and Jon Carver (WHO/HAC), Gilles Cimetiere, Matteo Perrone (WFP) and Jane Muyundo (WVI).

The content and judgements made in this report are solely those of the authors and members of the project team.

Introduction

The earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 and left more than one million homeless and around 230 thousand dead. On 18 February 2010 the United Nations (UN) launched one of the largest ever humanitarian fund raising campaigns to help the devastated island nation. On 31 March a total of US$5.3 billion was pledged by a committee of governments at a United Nations conference to be spent over the upcoming 18 months. Haiti’s disaster attracted unprecedented global attention. It is estimated that over 3000 NGOs were involved in the relief operation.

Prior to the earthquake, the Toussaint L’Ouverture airport in Port-au-Prince was handling up to 12 planes per day. Following the earthquake, approximately 120 to 150 planes were landing on a daily basis carrying relief cargo [2, 3]. As the Shelter Cluster indicated, over 700 thousand plastic sheets (tarpaulins), 100 thousand tents and 135 thousand transitional shelters were distributed. WFP over the period from January to July distributed over 104 thousand tons of food.

Haiti has a fragile environment since the early 1980s. The country has only 2-3% coverage of primary vegetation. Deforestation, land degradation, pollution of streams and rivers, solid waste related pollution and excessive source extraction are serious environmental problems in Haiti.

Given the size and urgency of humanitarian operation, some of the environmental issues were overlooked and they brought even more environmental pressure to the fragile ecosystem. It must be noted that by many aspects Haiti’s earthquake led to an atypical humanitarian emergency. Therefore, it does not represent an ‘average’ disaster related event and/or response to it. Haiti’s earthquake was extraordinary in its size, number of victims, socio-economic situation in country, proximity to the US, the massive media and celebrity attention, as well as amounts of goods that were sent into the country. For instance, Haiti attracted massive media attention which alerted people around the world and drew large amounts of unrequested gifts and in-kind donations (GIKs). Moreover, the earthquake had a devastating impact on the local population and business, and therefore some of the solutions, typical in many other emergencies, were hard to apply. Read more...

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-by Jurgita Balaisyte and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 11 November 2010-

On October 4th The Guardian reported on the following shocking story: ‘Still marooned: plight of flood-stricken villagers in Pakistan's Sindh province. Plagued by bandits, threatened by malaria: island-villages remain desperate for aid as floods refuse to go away’..

Pakistan: Today's Status

Slow onset disasters such as the floods in Pakistan spread and bring destruction gradually. It has been months since the floods started and there are still no good forecasts on when the impact will recede. The areas of land still remain under water, communities cut off and dependent on food aid. On September 21st, OCHA reported ‘the flood waters were still rising and every day 20,000 to 30,000 people are newly displaced’. New towns and villages were flooded while in some areas drinking water supplies were cut due to possible contamination. The latest government estimates show that over 20 million people have been affected by the floods, 75 percent of which live in the Sindh and Punjab districts.

As for the 28th of October one-fifth of the country's territory was still affected and more than 7 million people were homeless. Even though water started receding, a vast number of villages along the Indus River are still not fit to live in. More than 7,000 schools have been destroyed. As Save the Children indicates, millions of children face months of hardship and uncertainty.

How serious is this disaster? What makes it different from other catastrophes of similar scale and what can be done to overcome it? Read the rest of this article...

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-by Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 17 August 2010-

The humanitarian context is rapidly changing but the humanitarian ecosystem is plagued by what we call the knowledge-doing gap. We see it coming but apparently we are incapable to act. It just seems too hard to change our ways.

Who do we think we’re fooling?
Everyone agrees the humanitarian case load is increasing rapidly while funds are drying up. A child can tell that this means we are driving ourselves into a wall.
Our world is critically inter-dependent and highly non-linear, but we keep acting as if action-outcome links are simple and linear. We believe we shall be able to fix things when they arise. Well, we won’t. We shall increasingly be victims of complex feed-forward and feedback loops in dynamic systems, i.e. we shall always run behind the facts if we do not accept this simple reality and start acting accordingly. For instance, food prices will again increase dramatically because of the drought in Europe. This will put even more people in a life-threatening situation in completely different parts of the world.

These waves of crises will persist. They will even intensify and their effects will be more abrupt and unexpected. We need a dynamic and integrated approach to risk and scenario analysis in order to anticipate major disequilibria and to adequately prepare for timely response. Read the rest of this article...

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INSEAD Professor Luk Van Wassenhove, Director of INSEAD's Social Innovation Centre, together with the Humanitarian Research Group Team, have been monitoring the crisis in Haiti since the 7.1 earthquake struck Tuesday 12 January 2010, including being in touch with relevant NGOs, companies and governments who are providing aid and support to the victims and the country. Keep informed. For updates on resources, donations, research and media or to get in contact with the team, read more...

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